Mass mailing companies to pay for email

Mass mailing companies to pay for email

America Online and Yahoo! are two of the world’s largest provider of web mail services. And they have decided to charge a small fee to mass mailing companies to ensure that their newsletters and other messages reach the inboxes of their customers.

They would have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp to get preferential treatment for their messages. This could cost them between 1/4 cent to a penny for each mail delivered to the end user.

AOL and Yahoo! believe that this would enable them to keep a check on companies, which spam the inboxes of their web mail services. And if this system is indeed adopted widely, they are also going to earn millions of dollars each year.

However, this service is optional and would benefit the companies, which deal in legitimate mass mailing. Their mails would skip the spam filters and directly land in the mail boxes of the users. This is however not amusing the market experts who believe that this step would risk alienating users and companies that send e-mail.

Richi Jennings, an analyst at Ferris Research said in a statement related to this new initiative from the tech giants in the US: “AOL users will become dissatisfied when they don’t receive the e-mail that they want, and when they complain to the senders, they’ll be told, ‘It’s AOL’s fault.”

AOL and Yahoo! would be using services provided by Goodmail Systems for this new system. Interestingly, this effort is meeting with a lot of criticism especially from another internet giant Google who have clearly said that they are not in favor of a paid mechanism for sending mails to user’s inboxes without letting them pass through the spam filters installed on the servers.